Moderator Elections - call for comments
Chris Ish
comments from news.groupies that have experience with moderator elections.
We would love to hear about any anecdotes/comments/experiences/advise that
you might have.
Thanks.
--
Chris Ish
c_...@mindspring.com
Proponent and active advisor for the proposed group misc.kids.family
John David Galt
> Joe suggested that if we started a different thread we might get some
> comments from news.groupies that have experience with moderator elections.
> We would love to hear about any anecdotes/comments/experiences/advise that
> you might have.
How can there be moderator elections? UVV refuses to handle them even if a
group's charter provides for having them.
Of course, moderators are "chosen" by the marketplace: if they don't allow
the content you want to read or write, you move to (or start) a forum that
does allow it. So long as this is relatively easy to do (and it is, if you
count services like yahoogroups.com), I don't see a problem.
Just Me
"John David Galt" <j...@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us> wrote in message
news:3D9A4A67...@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us...
Thank you for your input. I think, however, what is being requested is
information, opinions and experience with moderated newsgroups where they
are set up that the readership elects new moderators from time to time.
Would you [or anyone else hereabouts, for that matter} have some interesting
or helpful experience or observations on that matter?
-Aula
Tom Galloway
Chris Ish <c_...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Joe suggested that if we started a different thread we might get some
>comments from news.groupies that have experience with moderator elections.
>We would love to hear about any anecdotes/comments/experiences/advise that
>you might have.
Basically, you need N things:
1) Acceptance from the current moderator, assuming the group already exists,
that they'll pass the position to the winner of the election.
2) Someone generally trusted by the newsgroup regulars to accept and count
the votes.
When I did this a while back for rec.arts.comics.info, there were three
candidates so I did it Australian ballot style; people ranked the candidates
1, 2, 3. First round, counted how many 1s each got. Since no one got a
majority, the last place candidate was eliminated. Take all the ballots
that ranked them as 1. On those ballots, see who was listed with a 2, and
put the ballots that marked each person as a 2 in with the pile of ballots
that marked them with a 1. Count and see who won.
tyg t...@Panix.com
Chris Ish
"Tom Galloway" <t...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:aniq2c$l4k$1...@panix2.panix.com...
Thanks.
You raise some good points about the need to detail exactly how the ballots
will be counted and to determine ahead of time who will count them. The
issue of transference of power I think is settled since I am confident that
the group owner (Brian) will enforce the charter whether the moderators are
willing to relinquish control or not.
Jim Riley
<j...@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us> wrote:
>Chris Ish wrote:
>> Joe suggested that if we started a different thread we might get some
>> comments from news.groupies that have experience with moderator elections.
>> We would love to hear about any anecdotes/comments/experiences/advise that
>> you might have.
>
>How can there be moderator elections? UVV refuses to handle them even if a
>group's charter provides for having them.
UVV is independent of Tale. Have they ever been requested to conduct
a moderator election?
--
Jim Riley
Jim Riley
wrote:
>Joe suggested that if we started a different thread we might get some
>comments from news.groupies that have experience with moderator elections.
>We would love to hear about any anecdotes/comments/experiences/advise that
>you might have.
soc.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated
soc.religion.paganism
Both have provisions for moderator elections in their charters. I
don't know how successful they have been.
The proposals to moderate soc.culture.new-zealand and
soc.culture.nordic both had provisions in their charter for moderator
and moderation policy elections. Neither passed. Both were primarily
intended to be robomoderated to curb cross-posting and spam, but there
was some concern that they might in the future want to change the
moderation to address other problems and not be locked into an
out-of-date charter.
The moderation itself was quite simple, the election policy was quite
complex. It might have been the case that so much time was spent
rangling over the election details that people became bored. If they
had just said we're going to block cross-posts, it may have been that
they would been appproved, and then been able at some future date to
informally change the moderation policy in a consensual way. Or maybe
it wouldn't have mattered what they did, that there just wasn't the
interest level.
--
Jim Riley
Joe Bernstein
<jim...@pipeline.com> wrote:
> UVV is independent of Tale. Have they ever been requested to conduct
> a moderator election?
I've never heard of UVV being asked to conduct any of the votes they're
said to refuse to do - moderator elections, charter change votes,
STV, conditional voting, whatever. If it's happened, it's been
before my time or while I've been away.
The usual claim when these statements about what UVV won't do is
that they're too busy, and given that UVV seems to have only one
to two members at a time, these last few years, that strikes me as
plausible. But it's not a guarantee that one of those one or two
people might not want to try something different once in a while.
:-)
Any of these claims could very easily be based on public statements,
"Don't pester us for X", by the successive heads of UVV. I don't
know whether there would be some kind of punishment for a UVV
member who went ahead and did X anyway. It would put the UVV in
an awkward position for the future - "You held our moderator
election in 2002, why won't you hold it in 2004?" But it's not as
though the UVV is ever rich enough in votetakers to go spanking
them for doing too much work...
Joe Bernstein, curious
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>
Russ Allbery
>> UVV is independent of Tale. Have they ever been requested to conduct
>> a moderator election?
> I've never heard of UVV being asked to conduct any of the votes they're
> said to refuse to do - moderator elections, charter change votes, STV,
> conditional voting, whatever. If it's happened, it's been before my
> time or while I've been away.
It's happened in the past; no big deal is generally made of it. The vote
isn't considered "binding," but if it's good enough for the readers of the
group, that's generally good enough for everyone else.
> Any of these claims could very easily be based on public statements,
> "Don't pester us for X", by the successive heads of UVV. I don't know
> whether there would be some kind of punishment for a UVV member who went
> ahead and did X anyway. It would put the UVV in an awkward position for
> the future - "You held our moderator election in 2002, why won't you
> hold it in 2004?"
I think most of those sorts of issues could be dealt with by proper
management of expectations and making it clear that the vote was being
taken by a UVV member but not under the aegis of the UVV.
Of course, that assumes one finds a UVV member who's willing.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Russ Allbery
> Yes, but I don't see a reader of the group asking for it.
> This is sort of ridiculous. If it wasn't CLEAR that the group is almost
> 99% in agreement, someone should go back and read harder.
What on earth are you talking about? The proponent posted specifically
asking for information about moderator elections.
Are you under the mistaken impression that this thread has something to do
with rec.skiing.alpine.moderated?
Just Me
"Joe Bernstein" <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
news:3d9f5629$0$189$892e...@authen.yellow.readfreenews.net...
Well, I'm very curious now. Who or what is UVV anyway [and what does the
accronym stand for, too?] How does one get in contact with UVV and how does
one become a member of UVV? What does the membership do other than count
votes?
-Aula, curiouser and curiouser
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.394 / Virus Database: 224 - Release Date: 10/3/02
Just Me
"Joe Bernstein" <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote in message
news:3d9f5629$0$189$892e...@authen.yellow.readfreenews.net...
> <jim...@pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> > UVV is independent of Tale. Have they ever been requested to conduct
> > a moderator election?
And, while we are at it, what is Tale? Who is Tale? Same questions as the
ones I just asked about UVV......
-Aula, just me just wondering
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
>
>Well, I'm very curious now. Who or what is UVV anyway [and what does
>the accronym stand for, too?] How does one get in contact with UVV and
>how does one become a member of UVV? What does the membership do other
>than count votes?
Usenet Volunteer Votetakers. They're the ones who run the votes for
Big-8 newsgroups. Surprisingly enough, you can find more info at
http://www.uvv.org/
--
--- Aahz <*> (Copyright 2002 by aa...@pobox.com)
Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://www.rahul.net/aahz/
Androgynous poly kinky vanilla queer het Pythonista
"Whoa, wait. Just how far does this go anyway? Do we start suspecting
everybody?"
"No, of course not. Anyone in the Nightwatch is automatically recognized
as working in the best interests of Earth." --JMS, "Messages From Earth"
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
>
>And, while we are at it, what is Tale? Who is Tale? Same questions as
>the ones I just asked about UVV......
Tale is a mystery inside a conundrum wrapped in a myth. No, really!
Supposedly, Tale is the person ultimately in charge of the Big-8. He
runs the software (wrote much of it), and has possession of the PGP keys
used to authenticate Big-8 control messages. However, Tale has been too
busy to actually do any work in recent years, and the Big-8 control
structure has been largely on auto-pilot. This nearly led to a disaster
when Tale was in a motorcycle accident. Currently, there is work going
on for a group of people to take over from Tale, but as is typical for
anything involving Tale, the process is taking place largely in secret.
Russ Allbery is leading the effort, though.
Just Me
"Mean Green Dancing Machine" <aa...@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:ano78i$430$1...@panix1.panix.com...
> In article <TTLn9.13422$S8.4...@twister.tampabay.rr.com>,
> Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
> >
> >Well, I'm very curious now. Who or what is UVV anyway [and what does
> >the accronym stand for, too?] How does one get in contact with UVV and
> >how does one become a member of UVV? What does the membership do other
> >than count votes?
>
> Usenet Volunteer Votetakers. They're the ones who run the votes for
> Big-8 newsgroups. Surprisingly enough, you can find more info at
> http://www.uvv.org/
Thank you very much for all this information. It makes the pieces fit
together better. I had no idea that Tale was a person. That is fascinating
and I'd love to hear the story how Tale came to be in that position in the
first place. That sounds like usenet legend material if I ever heard tell!
-Aula
ba...@dmcom.net
> And, while we are at it, what is Tale? Who is Tale? Same questions as the
> ones I just asked about UVV......
Tale is the n.a.n moderator, he has the final descion on any big-8 group
proposal.
UVV = Usenet Viluntee Votetakers , independent vote takers to conduct
votes. They only conduct votes for groups ptoposed that they do not
care what the Result will be.
--
news:alt.pagan FAQ at http://www.dmcom.net/bard/altpag.txt
news:alt.religion.wicca FAQ at http://www.dmcom.net/bard/arwfaq2.txt
news:news.groups FAQ at http://www.dmcom.net/bard/ngfaq.txt
Want a new group FAQs http://web.presby.edu/~nnqadmin/nnq/ncreate.html
Jim Riley
>In article <anm26s$45q$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>, Jim Riley
><jim...@pipeline.com> wrote:
>
>> UVV is independent of Tale. Have they ever been requested to conduct
>> a moderator election?
>
>I've never heard of UVV being asked to conduct any of the votes they're
>said to refuse to do - moderator elections, charter change votes,
>STV, conditional voting, whatever. If it's happened, it's been
>before my time or while I've been away.
It may simply be a mismatch of expectations about what the UVV can do
(independent counting of votes) and what they can not (implement the
results of the elections). The people wanting charter change
elections aren't wanting someone to determine the consensus of the
participants about what the topic of a newsgroup is and the style and
form that discussion should take. They want it to regarded as an
official set of rules, that will somehow be enforced. But all Tale
will do is include the text of the "charter" with the newgroup message
and maintain it as part of the nan archive. Similarly, the UVV has no
way of changing the moderators of a newsgroup if the current
moderators were somehow voted out of office.
--
Jim Riley
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
>
>Thank you very much for all this information. It makes the pieces fit
>together better. I had no idea that Tale was a person. That is fascinating
>and I'd love to hear the story how Tale came to be in that position in the
>first place. That sounds like usenet legend material if I ever heard tell!
Spaf handed him the position:
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." --Gene Spafford
John David Galt
> It may simply be a mismatch of expectations about what the UVV can do
> (independent counting of votes) and what they can not (implement the
> results of the elections). The people wanting charter change
> elections aren't wanting someone to determine the consensus of the
> participants about what the topic of a newsgroup is and the style and
> form that discussion should take. They want it to regarded as an
> official set of rules, that will somehow be enforced. But all Tale
> will do is include the text of the "charter" with the newgroup message
> and maintain it as part of the nan archive. Similarly, the UVV has no
> way of changing the moderators of a newsgroup if the current
> moderators were somehow voted out of office.
Why can't they change the forwarding of the standard moderator alias?
ba...@dmcom.net
Similarly, the UVV has no
> > way of changing the moderators of a newsgroup if the current
> > moderators were somehow voted out of office.
>
> Why can't they change the forwarding of the standard moderator alias?
UVV does not have the keys to change them, that is under isc control and
not working well (it does work slowly). It might be posible for policy
change to allow a result to cause a change, however if sitting
moderators refuse to accept the Results, the new moderators will need a
new host and bot running for any change to be implimented.
Graham Drabble
in news:3DA09C85...@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us:
> Jim Riley wrote:
>> Similarly, the UVV has no way of changing the
>> moderators of a newsgroup if the current moderators were somehow
>> voted out of office.
>
> Why can't they change the forwarding of the standard moderator
> alias?
The moderation database is controlled by Tale (although operated by
others on his behalf) rather than the UVV. Current policy is that Tale
will not change the forwarding address unless
a) It is requested by the moderator or
b) The moderator has been inactive and is untraceable.
Therefore all the voting procedures in the charter are worth nothing if
the current moderators don't accept the results. (Who would be
considered definitive in the case of a split moderation panel is
unknown. He may be guided by the charter then but he wouldn't have to
be.)
--
Graham Drabble
If you're interested in what goes on in other groups or want to find
an interesting group to read then check news.groups.reviews for what
others have to say or contribute a review for others to read.
Joe Bernstein
(and again, and again), so I'd really appreciate corrections. Thanks.
In article <anph33$8un$1...@panix1.panix.com>, Mean Green Dancing Machine
<aa...@pobox.com> wrote:
> In article <RmNn9.14455$S8.4...@twister.tampabay.rr.com>,
> Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
> >
> >Thank you very much for all this information. It makes the pieces fit
> >together better. I had no idea that Tale was a person. That is fascinating
> >and I'd love to hear the story how Tale came to be in that position in the
> >first place. That sounds like usenet legend material if I ever heard tell!
>
> Spaf handed him the position:
Um, this is actually closer to an urban legend. The short answer
is, no, Eliot Lear did. The long answer is something I want to
write anyway, so...
gather round, kiddies, while I tell the tale.
In the beginning was NET.general. At some point people decided that
talking about Usenet was worth a separate space and made NET.news.
There are still people on Usenet who were there then - at least
Tom Truscott and arguably Steve Bellovin - but they haven't told
me anything about this.
The archives cover the rest of the story.
Changes in news software - more or less, the writing of I think A News
- led to the lowercasing of the newsgroup names over the course of
May to September, 1981. (Yes, Usenet was then small enough that
everyone could actually catch up to a new standard in just four
months. Imagine.) So we now had net.general, net.news, and a bunch
of other groups. People who wanted a new newsgroup generally started
the conversation in net.general if they were polite. (If they weren't,
they just started the newsgroup; as you may have heard, all it took to
start a newsgroup in those days was to post to it, which resulted in
many typo groups. Mark Horton started net.jokes about ten minutes
after he proposed it; several proponents as late as 1982 stated in
their posts starting groups that previous proposals - which the archives
show no evidence of their ever having made - had led to massive acclaim
likewise invisible in the archives.)
net.general was the group everyone on Usenet was expected to read,
and the sense developed that not everyone on Usenet needed to read
about newsgroup debates, but the people in net.news didn't want them
either. The compromise was to create net.news.group. Jerry Schwarz,
later to become famous as the inventor of netiquette and FAQs, came
up with the idea, and Mark Horton did it, January 15, 1982. (news.groups
shares its birthday with Martin Luther King, Jr., folks...)
Meanwhile, the idea had been gathering force that someone should keep
track of all the groups that were out there. Mark Horton posted a
list of them in December 1981, and a week later a very premature
proposal for a great renaming. Curt Stephens started posting lists
in January, 1982, eventually posting four of them by autumn. But he
stopped over the summer and early fall, and Adam Buchsbaum, then in
high school, picked up the slack, posting by far the most complete
list of groups to date in November, 1982. Buchsbaum then continued
posting these lists for nearly two years. The acclaim almost immediately
went to his head, and he became the first rmgrouper known to me one
month later, though not all of the groups he killed stayed dead.
Unbridled growth was, however, seen as a problem also by people who
were not in high school. Mark Horton had already organised a group
of sites which were the "backbone" of Usenet, and I think he'd
started a mailing list of their admins. At some point he turned
the job of maintaining the mailing list, and, in effect, the
backbone itself, over to Gene Spafford, then a grad student in
Georgia. When Adam Buchsbaum went off to college in August 1984,
Gene Spafford volunteered for the list-maintenance job too.
Let's pause a moment here for technology. In the early days, Usenet
operated by computers calling each other up in the middle of the
night and trading copies of files, using the Unix-to-Unix-CoPy
program, that is, uucp. The resulting network was therefore the
UUCPnet. It was *separate* from the Internet (and in some places
still is). The importance of the backbone mailing list was that
the admins on it (except for Spafford) each controlled a computer
whose phone bills were paid for, a computer which could afford to
initiate calls not just to one, but to many, other computers. Hence
these computers were the main channels through which Usenet traffic
could pass. If a newsgroup sufficiently pissed off the backbone's
admins that they agreed to stop carrying its postings, that newsgroup
could still survive, but only through back-channel links that cost
real money to the sites that usually could just freeload off the
backbone. So the group Gene Spafford ran (though was not a member
of) was powerful in Usenet; and Spafford joined that power to the
most widely respected canon of what was an Official Newsgroup and
what was Not. (He also became moderator of various newsgroups for
new users, the posting of lists, and so forth.)
Many backbone administrators, often feeling heat from their bosses
over the size of the phone bills, were convinced that Usenet was out
of control. They got actively involved in things like inventing
moderated groups (the first one, net.announce, run by Mark Horton,
opened up in June 1983). There are group removals scattered all
through 1984, the year moderated newsgroups really took off, and I
wouldn't be surprised if backbone admins were often involved, but
starting in July 1985 such removals became routine, and in October
1985, when one of the groups removed was net.bizarre, the backbone
admins' effective rulership over Usenet was fully unveiled; Gene
Spafford's posted explanation for net.bizarre's removal was explicitly
that the backbone admins wanted it gone, and newspapers, which had
previously noticed Usenet, in the protests over "New Coke" and such,
as an anarchy, so reported the event: Anarchy Tamed. For the next
several years, in fact, rather few unmoderated groups were started;
although I haven't researched their creations in detail, I think the
usual claim that the backbone admins ran the show is probably
basically correct. It's worth noting that the entire fa.* hierarchy
could be renamed with basically no input from the moderators of its
groups, in the fall of 1985, by one admin.
In 1986, the admin who controlled the link to Europe demanded a
Great Renaming so he could sort out which groups to send overseas and
which not to. Between September 1986 and May 1987, this took place,
resulting in the Big 7 hierarchies that are now the Big 8. (At this
time, net.news.group - not the bogus newsgroup net.news.groups that
bard's FAQ mentions - was renamed to news.groups.) Much anger was
unleashed, many people were upset, and in May and June 1987, individual
backbone admins acting on their own proceeded to start both the alt.*
hierarchy and the inet distribution (an independent list of groups that
use the same names as Big 7/8 groups, a separate long story). It took
several months before people calmed down, but in September 1987, Gene
Spafford started posting lists of alt.* groups, in November he unveiled
a newsgroup creation procedure in which people could actually read about
the backbone's preferred way to be supplicated (it involved taking a
vote), and in January 1988 he started listing inet groups too.
Things then went along fairly peacefully for about a year. But
in the summer or early autumn of 1988, a proposal for a group called
comp.society.women - in comp.* partly to reflect its being aimed at
women in the computer-related professions, but partly to get it
shipped to Europe - passed its vote, but the backbone admins vetoed
it. An angry backbone admin proceeded to send the newgroup on his
own. Much more anger ensued, and the admins apparently basically
stopped speaking to each other. Two months later, in November or
so, Gene Spafford shut the mailing list down.
I need to pause for technology again here, because the obvious
question is, if the backbone admins were really necessary, why
is Usenet still here? - but if they weren't, why could they get
away with their takeover for so long? Well, what happened was that
more and more of Usenet got hooked up to the Internet, with its
own always-on backbone. Suddenly you didn't *need* to pay any
long-distance bills to get your netnews; you could freeload off
a network so big, it didn't even notice Usenet! Mind, there still
*is* a UUCPnet out there getting Usenet the old-fashioned way, but
already the inet distribution itself was built on the assumption
that most sites were on the Internet, and by late 1988, this was
true enough that the backbone admins had lost their power. The
one who appears, from what I've learned so far, to have been the
most hawkish, Rick Adams, even acquired a motivation for changing
course: he'd started the first (?) private ISP, which meant that
instead of paying for Usenet's content, he could charge people for
access to it.
I'm not really clear on what exactly happened next yet, but obviously
things could not go on indefinitely in a situation where the official
rules for creating a newsgroup called upon the decisions of a defunct
mailing list. (Well, they could; but I'm trying to keep current
flamewars out of this.) Finally, Greg Woods, who had been one of the
most respected of the backbone admins, wrote a new set of rules, the
"guidelines" that (albeit wholly rewritten) still run the show.
These were first posted in April 1989. The idea that just by voting
you could get a newsgroup, without having to beg *any* administrator's
special permission, caught on fast, and I gather that proposals
multiplied. So in the summer of 1989, Woods proposed a new group,
moderated of course, for nothing but proposals and votes and results,
and, well, maybe other stuff as it came up, and although I haven't
yet found the vote result or charter [1], evidently the group passed; on
September 4, 1989, news.announce.newgroups opened for business, with
Woods as moderator.
Yes, that's what I said. Greg Woods - *not* Gene Spafford - was the
first moderator of news.announce.newgroups.
If you read the archives of the first few months of nan, you may get
the sense - I certainly have - that Woods found the job a trial.
In any event, he went on vacation January 16, 1990, for three weeks.
He picked Eliot Lear, previously head of the bionet.* hierarchy,
as his backup. He never came back.
To my mind, Eliot Lear was the real founder of nan. Woods had
struggled with what to do with proposals that didn't go through his
group, the way the guidelines had said they should ever since
September 1989, and had changed course more than once. Lear, I
think, followed a fairly steady trend from tolerance for people
posting their documents elsewhere, in the beginning, towards firm
enforcement of rules by the end of his tenure. Woods had frequently
added moderators' notes mentioning this or that violation of the
guidelines, and had at one point written "But the poster insists
on posting it anyway". Lear was calmer, and I get the sense that
he had a better handle on how to tame the new anarchy. He also
initiated regular posts noting what groups had been proposed or
were being voted on, and what groups he'd recently sent newgroups
for. People started wondering just what Gene Spafford was needed
for anyway, and Spafford's voluminous posting runs of lists, FAQs
for new users, and other stuff became ever less frequent. He had
pneumonia and some sort of breakdown in the first half of 1991 and
hardly anyone even noticed that the posts were gone, or so he later
wrote.
But Eliot Lear didn't want to keep doing *his* job forever; he
had, after all, only signed up for a three-week stint. Finally,
on February 11, 1991, he announced that he was leaving, and that
his replacement would be Dave Lawrence <ta...@rpi.edu>, the man better
known these days as David C. Lawrence <newgroup...@isc.org>.
tale had great plans when he began, though he didn't talk much
about them. He indicated almost immediately that he expected to
be making major changes sometime soon, an indication that would
be repeated roughly once a year for the next five years. Concretely,
he definitely *did* start archiving the group, almost right away.
My reading of the early months of news.announce.newgroups derives
from my own attempt, after Google unveiled the longer archives it
now offers, to complete tale's archive by adding earlier material.
I have not yet taken the opportunity to read nearly so widely in
tale's archive, though it's been available longer, and so my story
is almost over.
But the crucial piece remains. In April of 1993, Gene Spafford
finally decided that he'd had enough. This is when he posted
the "farewell" letter that Aahz quoted, as sad a Usenet testament
as I have seen. In it, he gave his own account of how he came
to be where he was; it conflicts in several places with my account
above, but the archives are now available, so people can look into
this and decide for themselves. In any event, he did truthfully
report what would happen to the posts he posted and the groups he
ran. Mark Moraes took over the newbie FAQs and news.announce.newusers.
David Lawrence took over the lists and news.lists (since renamed to
news.lists.misc).
In other words, David Lawrence was now back in the position
Gene Spafford had been in from at least 1985 to 1988. He controlled
access to the official process for creating newsgroups, *and* he
controlled the lists *of* newsgroups most widely seen as official.
I don't know how widely this was remarked on at the time; we've
certainly gotten awfully accustomed to it since then.
But as moderator of news.announce.newgroups, he was *not* Gene
Spafford's direct heir, or indeed Spafford's heir at all. And the
person who *did* pick him out from the crowd, and start him to the
position of prominence he still holds, is too widely forgotten. To
the extent that we respect the Big 8 process, we owe some respect
also to Greg Woods, and especially to the man who, I think, really
made it the stable success it remained for so long, Eliot Lear.
Joe Bernstein
Mean Green Dancing Machine
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <anph33$8un$1...@panix1.panix.com>, Mean Green Dancing Machine
><aa...@pobox.com> wrote:
>> In article <RmNn9.14455$S8.4...@twister.tampabay.rr.com>,
>> Just Me <Yeah...@No.thank.you> wrote:
>>>
>>>Thank you very much for all this information. It makes the pieces fit
>>>together better. I had no idea that Tale was a person. That is fascinating
>>>and I'd love to hear the story how Tale came to be in that position in the
>>>first place. That sounds like usenet legend material if I ever heard tell!
>>
>> Spaf handed him the position:
>
>Um, this is actually closer to an urban legend. The short answer
>is, no, Eliot Lear did. The long answer is something I want to
>write anyway, so...
Thanks! In case it wasn't obvious, I was being flip, mostly as an excuse
to post that quote. I *think* I knew that Eliot Lear was the one
actually running n.a.n at the time Tale took over, but I'd forgotten that
Spaf never had anything to do with n.a.n.
Martin X. Moleski, SJ
>Parts of this post are a draft of something that may be posted again
>(and again, and again), so I'd really appreciate corrections. Thanks. ...
I'm too new to correct anything. I started reading a newsgroup in
the fall of 1995, so I believe I'm part of the September That Never
Ended.
Many thanks for providing the history of how we got where we
are today.
Marty
Wayne Brown
> gather round, kiddies, while I tell the tale.
Thanks for posting this, Joe. I wish there was some way to be certain
that every USENET poster had to learn this stuff...
My first experience with USENET came in 1988, almost exactly a year
after the completion of the Great Renaming. For a long time I was
just a lurker. (The earliest article of mine I can find on Google was
posted to comp.os.minix in May 1989. Back then, my email address was
...texbell!bigtex!loft386!ledgepc!wayne.) I regard those days as the
"Golden Age" of USENET. Gene Spafford was (and is) the symbol, to me, of
everything that was good about netnews, and I bitterly regretted (though I
understood) his decision to leave. To this day, if Spaf decided to come
back, I'd support any newsgroup ideas he proposed without hesitation,
whether they agreed with my current opinions or not. As far as I'm
concerned, where USENET is involved, Spaf's opinions have *always* been
"Right by Definition."
--
Wayne Brown | "When your tail's in a crack, you improvise
fwb...@bellsouth.net | if you're good enough. Otherwise you give
| your pelt to the trapper."
"e^(i*pi) = -1" -- Euler | -- John Myers Myers, "Silverlock"
Jim Riley
>Jim Riley wrote:
*If* Tale (or persons exercising his authority) were willing to switch
moderators on the basis of a vote, then the UVV would likely be the
group who would conduct such a vote.
Reasons why it is unlikely that Tale would approve such a procedure:
Changing the moderator aliases may not be effective. Articles don't
need to be submitted via a posting to the moderated newsgroup to be
approved. Some news sites may be configured to forward to the actual
moderators address. Other moderators may encourage submissions via
e-mail.
Authentication of approvals is not robust. If one or the other or
both of two competing moderators decides to enforce their moderation,
you are likely to have each cancelling the other's approved posts,
along with multiple repostings, all cancels being accepted by some
news sites, none by others. An ISP may or may not act to block
posting by a moderator who was voted out.
news.groups is not very good at resolving conflict. It is at its best
when one side has 120 would-be participants and the opposition is a
frictionless plane. It works not at all when several 100 Armenians
are determining the suitablity of moderators for
soc.culture.azerbaijan.
Moderated groups are effectively treated as a form of mailing list,
with the moderator acting in the same role as the list owner, with
complete authority to control what content is distributed.
--
Jim Riley
Joe Bernstein
night (much harder than posting usually is; I jumped through hoops)
and got a hung telnet session for my pains; today I see it neither at
the posting server nor at Google, so presume it didn't propagate. To
add to the entertainment, my attempt to post it last night required me
to type the References: header by hand, so it could be threaded just
about anywhere... (And still worse, I just found out that pasting my
.sig into Google's window stripped the space from the sigdash, at
least this time. Arrrggh!)
Unfortunately, this post's main reason for being is at least as
erratic a situation, concerning some statements in my previous post in
this subthread. What's clearest is that at least two of those
statements were false.
But as a special bonus, this post contains the original voted charter
of news.announce.newgroups, posted to Usenet, according to Google, for
the first time since the group's first CFV.
Wayne Brown <fwb...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:<hGjo9.42135$YK4.3...@e3500-atl2.usenetserver.com>...
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
> > gather round, kiddies, while I tell the tale.
>
> Thanks for posting this, Joe. I wish there was some way to be certain
> that every USENET poster had to learn this stuff...
You're welcome.
Actually, while there's no way to be certain, there's a way to at
least *offer* every Usenet poster the chance to learn this stuff. One
reason I wrote that post is that the first thing I was asked to write
for news.announce.newusers was a post on Usenet's history. I sent
last night a counter-offer, saying that I think a good post on history
would take a lot of time and I think netiquette still needs doing
first.
Mind, I'd still *love* to be pre-empted by someone else on the subject
of netiquette, and if they write back that I have been, I'll breathe a
huge sigh of relief.
But I very much doubt that someone else will send in a history of
Usenet before I do, given the length limits they seem to want. So
this is what the coy opening lines of my post meant: some of the
paragraphs in that one were dry runs for something broader than the
chronology-history of newsgroup creation that I've already been
writing, and that that post was, in general, part of.
Meanwhile, I urgently want to post a couple of corrections, and am
using this post as an opportunity to do so, so I'm going to quote a
couple of things you didn't quote... Alas, even though this post
mostly covered periods *much* more recent than the ones I posted about
back last winter, I'm *still* not getting corrections from people who
were there; these are items I've caught myself.
> Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
> > So in the summer of 1989, Woods proposed a new group,
> > moderated of course, for nothing but proposals and votes and results,
> > and, well, maybe other stuff as it came up, and although I haven't
> > yet found the vote result or charter [1],
I then cleverly left out the footnote. Sorry!
[1] Early posts in na.newgroups did refer to its having a charter.
The early posts in general talk about groups having charters as an
expected thing, but it isn't clear that "charter" in this context
always meant a specific piece of writing, as opposed to a general
sense of what a group was for. In any event, David Lawrence has made
a charter public, I *think* in one of his newgroups for the group (but
I have no way of checking this right now, since I have no access to a
computer where I could download and uncompress the control message
archive for the group). The way I remember it, this charter was
provably not the original one, but it's entirely possible that my
memory is making things up.
In any event, I find to my horror that I got other things wrong. Damn
it, Google just ain't fair. Yes, I had downloaded and chronologised
everything Google presented when I looked for the period through
February 1991 *in* news.announce.newgroups, but when I searched on
"news.announce.newgroups" as a *phrase* - which has been one of my
standard techniques, I can't imagine why I didn't think to do it here
- guess what I found?
> > evidently the group passed; on
> > September 4, 1989, news.announce.newgroups opened for business, with
> > Woods as moderator.
Post <2...@m1.UUCP>, dated 1 Sep 1989 20:17:26 GMT, was posted to
news.announce.newgroups alone, with Greg Woods's Approved: and Sender:
lines.
Oh, but it gets worse. I'm not going to list all the rest; suffice it
to say that the oldest post I found *this* way, and not taking into
account the possibility that Google's unreliable date-presentation has
shuffled the posts, is <609...@philabs.Philips.Com>, dated 5 Aug 89
22:04:12 GMT, also with Greg Woods's Approved: and Sender: lines. On
the other hand, in post <38...@ncar.ucar.edu>, dated 28 Jul 89 22:33:54
GMT, Woods says "It will be a couple of weeks before ANYTHING
happens", which makes it fairly obvious that the group didn't yet
exist *then*. His reason is that until Gene Spafford updated the
moderators list the group wouldn't work, which I guess refutes my
contention that Spaf had nothing to do with the group :-), and
Spafford was on vacation until August 5. As it turned out, Spafford
didn't add the group to his list until September 3, but Woods did open
for business on August 5 (and had numerous posts between then and
September 1); interesting.
And *all* of that said, the first CFV is archived; it's message-ID
<35...@ncar.ucar.edu>, dated 29 Jun 89 17:19:02 GMT. The name
"news.announce.newgroups" is new in this CFV, which is why I don't
find older discussion of it. Although it was by *no* means standard
for CFVs at this time to contain charters, this one does, and that
charter is therefore the voted charter:
"This group will contain all new newsgroup proposals (calls for
discussion), calls for votes, and voting results. It will contain ONLY
calls for discussion, calls for votes, voting results, and possibly an
occasional posting of the newsgroup creation deadlines. Other
proposals having to do with the newsgroup creation procedure will be
accepted if they are in the form of a call for discussion. NO
followups will be allowed. Followups will be directed to news.groups,
where all discussions will take place. It is intended that all new
newsgroup creations will happen via this group. The newsgroup creation
guidelines will be changed to reflect this."
I note, first of all, that the "present tense is best" meme did not
affect the writing of this charter. This is too bad, but is a point
of personal pleasure, since I have hopes that I actually was the
originator of that meme.[2]
More seriously, this is *obviously* not the way the charter was in
fact enforced by any moderator prior to the pair of people who I
*think* are currently moderating (?). Even Greg Woods allowed things
like mailing lists and other hierarchies to be advertised in nan
(following his being outvoted in a straw poll he suggested in late
August 1989), and Eliot Lear and David Lawrence followed him in this.
I'm reasonably certain now that this is not the charter tale has
promulgated (if not often), because if that charter had read like
this, I would immediately have noticed the conflict. (There were
other, minor, "charter changes" voted on or unilaterally announced
before tale took over; I don't remember now whether any of them
contained actual contradictions of the above text. If memory serves,
the 2/3rds rule, which *obviously* didn't modify the nan charter as we
would understand it, was discussed as a "charter change".)
I still haven't found the vote results, although I do note that a mass
ack showed that Gene Spafford had not yet voted but David Lawrence
had, late in the CFV period. An author search on Greg Woods shows him
still posting as recently as 1999, shows him campaigning to take over
the newsgroup creation process as early as April 1989, and shows him
talking about the group that became news.announce.newgroups by other
names starting in June 1989. But it still doesn't show the nan vote
result. The vote total is reported as 213-13 by two later, but not
necessarily independent, posts: Bob Sloane in
<1992Dec17.1...@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> dated, guess when, 17 Dec
92 11:38:06 CST, and D. W. James in <13...@idunno.Princeton.EDU> dated
6 Sep 91 22:04:02 GMT.
Anyway, on to another kind of posting off-topic by the original voted
charter:
> > Lear ... also
> > initiated regular posts noting which groups had been proposed
Wrong! Doofus me, posting without checking my materials first!
(Though since my materials are all on my isolated home computer, and I
post from a library, this is at least understandable doofusness.)
Eliot Lear *did* initiate posts tracking votes in progress, but these
didn't also list RFDs until the January 21, 1992 post, which was, of
course, posted by tale. So this is strictly to tale's credit, and
shame on me for giving it to the wrong person.
Joe Bernstein
[2] Google is being unhelpfully in conflict with my memories here -
surely I'd acquired this pet peeve before 1997? And the library is
closing. So I still don't know if I get the credit for the
present-tensing of charters. For what it's worth, on trying a
different search in the morning (charter AND tense AND {present OR
past}), the first example of this meme that I can find is my
line-by-line on misc.kids.moderated, <5uhusv$c...@xochi.tezcat.com>
dated 1997/09/02. Surely this just means that whoever taught it to me
did so using different words, but that's for someone else to find...